Results for tag: Google
As more APIs allow CORS, we can create some really cool integrations without any server side code. Google Maps API is an obvious one but I was surprised to see successful Ajax calls to the FaceBook Graph API which made me think about building and integrating these services. I was scraping FaceBook for Places, or geo locations, so it only makes sense to start with a world map where you can search, click, or drag markers to retrieve any latitude and longitude coordinates for your geo search.
Next, these geo coords are sent to my facebook function that initiates a graph search for places near the provided geo location. The response drops markers on the Google Map, similar to Google’s own Places API and examples. But, I also wanted to visualize this dataset in more details and used the jQuery DataTables plugin to make the API data available for easy viewing, searching, and filtering. You can get more data for a specific place by clicking on an id, which initiates another place API call and drops the JSON response in a modal window with code highlighting.
Google and Facebook for Geo Places on a Map and Table
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Google App Engine is a great platform for quickly developing and hosting web applications. There are alternatives but today we are going to dig into GAE and show how simple it is to get started. I have previously made a few posts on Go and Martini so today we are going to setup Martini on Google App Engine for the Go Language in order to launch an API in the cloud. Martini is a great framework for building a RESTful API and the workflow below will take you through all the steps, from downloading GoogleAppEngine to deploying our Martini API app:
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Since the Google search engine is dominating the internet search market, statistical data about search keywords can be very insightful. I was amazed when I first discovered Google Trends and I still think that it is a very powerful tool for marketers, researchers, website owners, and SEO experts. The tool has expanded quite a bit over the years and now you can do much more than just see the top 10 most popular keywords. Apart from viewing the latest hot searches and the most popular phrases over the last month, you can now see these top keyword trends in a cool visualization. If you select specific keywords, you can compare and chart up to 5 keywords over time and see the top and rising related searches. You can even filter by location, time, category, and type of search (web, image, news, shopping, or YouTube) or compare keywords by location or time range.
Adding to this, Google has added Top Charts which shows you most searched and trending keywords per category and you can filter or segment the data based on any time in the past. There is a ton that you can do with this data but isn’t it really annoying that there is no official Google Trends API? We do have the hot trends atom feed and that gives you 20 trends with approximate traffic numbers and related news items. This would be good for building a little widget but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of serious keyword and market analysis. So, today, I will dig in, sniff some network traffic and figure out what kind of calls are made between the browser and Google servers to provide this trending keyword data programatically.
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With the recent launch of the new Google Maps and my love for maps, I want to dedicate a post and create something with the version 3 of the Google Maps API. Street View is capturing more and more interesting locations around the world and it’s great that Google is constantly enhancing this feature. On top of this, other people are innovating and making things like Google Street Viewer and Hyperlapse which combine Google Street View and WebGL to make some awesome effects. The Google Maps API also supports 45° imagery for certain locations, which is another interesting map type. So, today, I will combine all these map views and create a Google Maps demo that explores geo locations with three different map types: roadmap, streetview, and tilt.
Multiple Google Maps
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I sometimes see latitude and longitude numbers provided in the response from API calls, and often, you want to pass this information to the user. But, it’s much nicer to convert these geo coordinates to an actual street address. This is called Reverse Geocoding and there are a number of web services that allow you to do this. For example, Google, Twitter, and Flickr all have methods in their API to reverse geocode. Let’s explore how that is done and since we are talking about the user experience, let’s also generate a static map of the geo location.
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